Through the Iron Bars eBook

I.

Theprisongates.

The English-speaking public is generally well informed
concerning the part played in the war by the Belgian
troops. The resistance of our small field army
at Liege, before Antwerp, and on the Yser has been
praised and is still being praised wherever the tale
runs. This is easy enough to understand.
The fact that those 100,000 men should have been able
to hold so long in check the forces of the first military
Empire in Europe, and that a great number of them,
helped by new contingents of recruits and led by their
young King, should still be fighting on their native
soil, must appeal strongly to the imagination.

If it be told how the new Belgian army, reorganised
and re-equipped after the terrible ordeal on the Yser,
is at the present moment much stronger than at the
beginning of the war, how it has been able lately
to extend its front in Flanders, and how some of its
units have rendered valuable help to the cause of
the Allies in East Africa and even in Galicia, the
story sounds like a fairy tale. There is, in the
history of this unequal struggle, the true ring of
legendary heroism; it seems an echo of the tale of
David and Goliath, or of Jack the Giant Killer; it
is full of the triumph of the spirit over the flesh,
of independence and free will over fatalism and brute
force, of Right over Might.

I feel confident that some day a poet will be able
to sing this great epic in verses which shall answer
to the swinging rhythm of battle and roll with the
booming of a thousand guns. But, in the meantime,
I should like to say a few words about a much humbler,
a much simpler, a much more familiar subject.
It awakes no classical remembrances of Leonidas or
Marathon. My heroes risk their lives, but they
are not soldiers, merely prosaic “bourgeois”
and workmen. They have no weapon, they cannot
fight. They have only to remain cheery in adversity
and patient in the face of taunts. They cannot
render blow for blow, they have no sword to flourish
against an insolent conqueror. They can only oppose
a stout heart, a loyal spirit, and an ironic smile
to the persecutions to which they are subjected.
They can do nothing—­they must do nothing—­only
hope and wait. But there are as much heroism
and beauty in their black frock-coats and their soiled
workmen’s smocks as in the gayest and most glittering
uniforms.

It is the plain matter-of-fact story of Belgian life
under German rule. Many more people will be tempted
to praise the glory of our soldiers. But, if
the incidents of conquered Belgium’s life are
not recorded in good time, they might escape notice.
People might forget that, besides the 150,000 to 200,000
heroes who are now waging war for Belgium on the Western
front, there are 7,500,000 heroes who are suffering
for Belgium behind the German lines, in the close
prison of guarded frontiers, cut off from the whole
world, separated alike from those who are fighting
for their deliverance and from those who have sought
refuge abroad.